Romanian: deja

Hello, it is evident it derivates from the French déjà, but when did it get into the Romanian language? Some etymological dictionaries state the date of the first appearance of a word, maybe someone has got that sort of dictionary and can check it for me. Just because if it got in not long ago I wonder how come such a common word was not used bofere in earlier centuries ....thanks.

The word was already established in the Romanian language since the beginning of the 19th century. In "Dictionariulu limbei romane: dupo insarcinarea data de Societatea Academica Romana. Volumul 1 : A-H" (1810-1881) the following explanation was provided:

You might be interested to know that in Arabic dialects of North Africa the word for “already” is also “déjà”. There is nothing unusual about such high-frequency words being borrowed from a prestige language.

Hello, it is evident it derivates from the French déjà, but when did it get into the Romanian language? Some etymological dictionaries state the date of the first appearance of a word, maybe someone has got that sort of dictionary and can check it for me. Just because if it got in not long ago I wonder how come such a common word was not used bofere in earlier centuries ....thanks.

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jam, jamjam, - the "jà" part in "déjà" derives from the same word in Latin, i. e. "iam" or, in later spelling, "jam". Cf. Italian "già", Spanish "ya", Catalan "ja".

....There is nothing unusual about such high-frequency words being borrowed from a prestige language.

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I doubt it...it's quite unusual borrowing words like that...I cannot check all the languages now but the English already was born in the 1300s (not borrowed), our Hungarian már in the 1400s..but I know nothing about Romanian, that's true. But I am afraid Romanian dictionaries do not state the date, so we will never learn when it happened.

I doubt it...it's quite unusual borrowing words like that...I cannot check all the languages now but the English already was born in the 1300s (not borrowed), our Hungarian már in the 1400s..but I know nothing about Romanian, that's true. But I am afraid Romanian dictionaries do not state the date, so we will never learn when it happened.

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I think that your supposition is not entirely correct. Sure it's rare that such an elementary word would be borrowed, but it has happened. For instance the words for "yes"; Romanian da (Slavic, although recent theories suggest another origin), Czech jo, Slovene ja (probably Germanic, I seem to recall this subject being discussed in a thread somewhere here).

When it comes to the subject at hand, I haven't managed to find any additional dates as to when the word was used for the first time; I have however checked the oldest texts in Romanian (from the 16th and 17th century) and deja does not occur. It was most probably introduced during the re-Latinisation of the language which took place in the 18-19th century. An inherited equivalent exists though and that is încă (< Latin unquăm) and was (and to some degree still is) used instead of deja. E.g. "încă(/deja) din copilărie..." (since childhood...).

Thank you Robbie, never mind. The problem is, interestingly enough, some etymology dictionaries say the date, others do not. I wonder why it is like that. It's like some monolingual dictionaries give the etymology of the word, the others do not, and I mean the languages altogether not the concrete types of books....

What I've noticed is that there are "only" etymological dictionaries and there are histocal-etymological dictionaries, as e.g. the "A magyar nyelv történeti-etimológiai szótára". The latter used to the give the date and source and context of the first written occurencies, while the former only the etymology. But I am speaking rather of printed books, not about online dictioaries.